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Monday, April 06, 2009

Build Your Own Drum Kit!

From Katryna:

A beautiful day called for finally trying to put together this drum kit. So I fetched the big white bucket I got last week after HooteNanny and found an old veggie steamer whose feet had fallen off. I got a pot top that goes to a pot we no longer own and found some planters and an empty tennis ball can. (The tennis balls were being used by Amelia and Dave for "baseball" practice.) First I set the drum kit up on the legs of the one and only chair we have in our yard. Then I though better of that and moved the whole mess to the swing-set we inherited from our neighbors. It has certainly seen better days, but it has lots of good spots to attach things. I used rubber bands to attach the steamer and pot lid. I found some drum sticks in our music bucket and let William go at it. Soon his sister had joined him and the arguing that ensued was a cue to Dave and me that we might need to make 2 drum kits. Dave is planning on building a frame for the drums out of wood so that we can free the swing-set up for sliding and swinging again. As the day went on, the kids found other objects in the yard to add to their drum set. This served a dual purpose- cleaning up the yard from its debris and giving more textures to their percussion. An empty maple bucket and some big planters served as toms and drum thrones. Some hunks of Christmas tree trunks served as wood blocks. This is SO easy to do. Any combo of buckets and pieces of wood will suffice.

1 comment:

Hi,Cool drums! I have used large sized joint compound buckets for African drumming. They seem to be in dumpsters at construction sites.I heard an interview with Richard Weissbourd on NPR this morning. He was touting is book, The Parents Mean to Be. It deals with some of the same parenting issues you have written about recently. There is a podcast at Fresh Air.NPR.org which likely give you some of his thoughts.Best wishes.Paul

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About this Blog

This blog started in 2004 as a way for Nerissa and Katryna Nields to continue to blather to their fans while Katryna was on maternity leave after giving birth to her son. Mostly Nerissa posts because she has a great need to blather, but occasionally Katryna gets a word (or a cartoon) in. These days, we are preparing for the release of our 16th album, The Full Catastrophe. We are also mothers, and love to explore how our children and our roles as moms impacts our writing and music. We have written a book which came out in September 2011 called All Together Singing in the Kitchen: Creative Ways to Make and Listen to Music with Your Family.

Nerissa is the author of two other books; Plastic Angel (Scholastic, 2005), a story of two teen age girls who find purpose and meaning through friendship and music; and How to Be an Adult, a guide for 20 somethings who have need of a road map.

For the purposes of protecting the anonymity of her children, Nerissa's daughter is called "Elle" and her son is called "Jay" in these writings. Her husband Tom is referred to as "Tom," only without the quotation marks.